The Glory Boys

He waited a full two minutes after McCoy had gone, then the curtains swished their way across the broad window. He noted that when they closed they were completely together, letting no light escape from the room.

He bent hurriedly down, picked up a small stone from the gravel, scratched the wall at the place where the curtains had met. Almost immediately the drapes opened again.

While he waited for McCoy he repeated the scratch in the wall over his original mark. This time he drew a six-pointed star a little more than four inches across from tip to tip. He was still smiling about it when McCoy joined them.

'We must get some gloves,' Famy said. 'Thick ones that will withstand broken glass, cover the hand and the wrist.'

In the mind of Abdel-El-Famy the assassination plan was complete. Beautiful and totally simple.

The drugs scene in London as in any major capital is a brutal and violent one. A below-surface cancer invisible till the skin of society is scraped. Young detectives like Doris Lang, who attempted to infiltrate the market and supply the evidence required by the courts to convict the

'pushers', went through extensive and thorough training before they abandoned their conventional trim clothes for those of the teenagers and drop-outs among whom they would now move.

She had been on a three-week course to learn the medical side of the menace, to be taught the arts of survival in an alien society, and had spent two concentrated days in a gymnasium with an instructor who taught self-defence.

She was a capable young woman, used to looking after herself, and the Detective Inspector to whom she reported had few fears about her personal safety. What he was looking for from her was, first of all, patience, and, when that was rewarded, detail.

She had seen McCoy and Famy leave the house, and then spent twenty-five minutes reading and gossiping casually and inconsequentially with her new friends before she excused herself and left. On the stair landing on the floor immediately below the room occupied by the two newcomers she had stood stock-still for a full minute, listened to the sounds of the building, convincing herself that in the upper reaches of the house she would be alone.

She had been disappointed with her earlier search in the small hours. She had used the time on the clock that her training suggested, just after 4 a.m., when the psychiatrists say the human physique is at its most vulnerable and yearning for deep sleep. But she had recognized that this search could only be a cursory one, though she had weighed the chances of her discovery as being slight. In daylight she could be slower, more observant.

None of the locks to the rooms was fitted with a key, and she was able to turn the handle and walk in. In her left hand was a small memory-pad and a pencil stub. She worked through the men's possessions for twelve minutes.

Much of the time was spent rearranging the clothing in the Arab's grip-bag and McCoy's old suitcase so that they would not detect her hand among the socks, and the underclothes and the shirts. She found no papers belonging to either man, no passports, letters, driving licences; no hint of their identity.

There was nothing remarkable in the clothing she looked at that lay in the case. It was the contents of the grip-bag that fascinated her. The clothes in themselves were unexceptional, except that every maker's tag and washing and cleaning instruction had been removed. Not pulled away, but conscientiously unstitched.

She wrote that down on the pad, beneath the times of arrival and departure, and the descriptions she had taken of the two men. She felt the frustration that came from the failure to explain their presence in the commune. Perhaps, she thought, their trip today would provide her with something, perhaps when they returned there would be papers which she could find if she came again in the cold, desolate hours before dawn.

At Scotland Yard Jones saw the Assistant Commissioner (Crime) in his office close to the operations room on the fifth floor of the building. As a result of the meeting two considerable and widescale programmes would be put into operation. First, a dragnet to try to locate and then arrest the man McCoy and his unknown partner. Second, the gathering together of the security necessary to protect the Israeli professor when he visited London. It was the first plan that took the majority of their time. Jones sketched through the information the department had collected in the previous twenty-four hours, in some instances with-holding sources but allowing the policeman a detailed picture of the circumstances that surrounded the threat to Sokarev. He emphasized the faint but possible connection between the Irishman and the North London communes.